Peter Worsley: A Life
Interviewed by Alan Macfarlane, filmed by Sarah Harrison, at his home on 25th February 1989, using a video 8 camera.
[Later additions in 2004 by Peter Worsley in square brackets, and in notes at the end]
Part 1: From childhood to Australia (60 mins)
0:00:28 Born in 1924. Parents and early life. Merseyside. Lower middle class background [we lived in middle-class Wallasey, but father’s business was in proletarian Birkenhead, so I knew a divided society) misery around, old blind men selling matches, proletarians, class injustice, the Orwellian world, a growing sense of injustice
Sent to a Catholic school, father a [very tolerant] Catholic
0:02:30 Catholic discipline at school; physical punishment; Jesuits, storing up merit in heaven, thinks extremely immoral, [see note 1 at end] made me unhappy and physically sick, then went to another marvellous [Protestant, liberal] school and stimulating. So became early aware of two cultures.
0:04:20 became head boy at Wallasey Grammar school in 1940/1, always aware of democracy and inequality and the rights of minorities because of Catholic background, and sensitized to other cultures. [see note 3 at end]
0:05:10 went to University, partly due to inspiring masters in English and history, ruined for natural sciences [see note 2 at end]. Went to Cambridge to read English [because of my wonderful English teacher] – a Leavisite in 1942. Social criticism of Leavisites by Eliot, Lawrence and Raymond Williams
0:07:00 the effects of Stalingrad siege. The Red Army stood between us and conquest. A huge influence on me. So it was not long before I joined the Communist Party in Cambridge [since discovered that the Cambridge University Socialist Club had c.1000 members – the biggest in Cambridge]. Not in the spy generation. We were young people who had anti-fascist enthusiasm. Very respectable and patriotic.
0:08:17 Went into army, straight into Officer’s Training School in Wales, the Royal Artillery. Surrounded by older and more mature people [see note 4 at end]. Got into trouble in guard duty, [because I’d never done it before].
0:10:20 The time of Alamein. The blitz over [so need for AckAck]. Converted into the infantry. Volunteers were needed for East and West Africa and chose East Africa. Marvellous out there [after the austerity of wartime England and the blackout]. Egypt a revolting experience, mind blowing poverty. We are very racist – realized through experience in Egypt and India. We blamed them for their poverty, an attitude which continues to this day.
0:11:40 I was a Red, I went to India and made contact with the Indian Communist Party as did people like John Saville. [Communists in the forces in Italy] were selling the Daily Worker to the troops [on trains]. There was an elected Forces Parliament in Cairo and the Communists won one quarter of the votes.
0:13:17 I was entranced with Black Africa and learnt Swahili. Got interested in African languages and culture and got to know the African troops through language. [Taught myself Nandi].
0:14:30 Went to Orissa in India, nearly went to Malaya [one week later, we would have been in invasion], where I would with others have been butchered by the Japanese. But the war ended, which I heard from jungle drums [returning to camp one night].
0:15:00 Back to East Africa, taking African troops back to their villages. [A wonderful, happy time. Saw a lot of East Africa, from Sudan to S.Tanganjika. The demobilized soldiers were, of course, full of joy!] So I determined to be an anthropologist. I read a lot of anthropology.
Second undergraduate education: anthropology
0:16:21 When I returned I wanted to change course at Emmanuel College. I asked, timorously, for sociology [but was told they hadn’t any, but I could do anthropology – which was what I actually wanted! Welbourne told me 90% of ex-Army changed courses!], so I did anthropology.
0:17:04 Anthropology was in a shocking state generally. Prof. Hutton on caste and Nagas, mostly about soul stuff, head-hunters etc. for hours on end. The material culture very funny. Bushnell and practicals on ways of making fire (fire drills) and spear throwers being hurled around in Downing Street. Godfrey Lienhardt was the Examiner and prompted my answers. Hippo killing spear.
0:19:15 Physical anthropology and Archaeology – don’t believe they are linked to anthropology, irrelevant. Much of my time dis-education.
0:20:02 Anthropological studies proper. I found a hoard of books, but they were like dirty or banned books behind an iron grill [in Prof. Hutton’s room!], [e.g. Rhodes Livingstone Institute publications]. One needed special permission to read them. “Modern” anthropology hardly born.
0:20:29 Hutton on Freud, his mannerisms, ‘damn nonsense’. Reo Fortune appointed, a breath of fresh air, but the bizarreness of Reo.
0:21:50 Went to Heffers, learnt a little about lineage systems. Reo, powerful insights and both serious and crazy.
0:22:40 G.I. Jones really pedestrian ex-government official, though good on land tenure. Another dis-education.
0:23:06 H.S.Bennett told him not to go to Leavis’ lecture in the 1940’s. That period dreary in the extreme, arbitrarily leaving out huge chunks of literature. Bad English literature and bad anthropology. Only one’s fellow students were exciting.
0:24:11 Fellow students included Jack Goody, Frank Girling (in C.P.), Ramkrishna Mukherjee. They were married and rather remote and did not see much of them.
0:25:07 Kathleen Gough – adorable and intelligent, but remote as two years above
0:25:50 Evans-Pritchard used to come over, the only ray of light. He gave a course for colonial officers, marvellous, talking about African Political Systems. Also H.A.R.Gibb (non-anthropologist) on Islam was marvellous and learnt a lot
0:26:45 Graham Clark the archaeologist, wrote interestingly, but his lectures were dreary in the extreme, he had come from Libya and very boring. I’m anti-archaeology. It can be interesting in the wide sweep, e.g. Gordon Childe and Glyn Daniel (who was my tutor for a while).
0:27:35 Jack Trevor was my first tutor. He knew some social anthropology. Not a very effective teaching system.
0:28:03 I resent the arrogant upper-class and elitist assumption that Cambridge and Oxford are the centre of the world, much as I loved being there. I had two lousy dis-educations. They are good places to leave.
0:28:33 The ground-nut scheme in Africa was being launched. [I thought this sounded like a good program and went to Unilever House for interview. High powered scientists recommended pulling out bush and planting ground nuts.] I was hired to teach ‘Basic English’, the Africans were to be given decent education and health. A modification of IA Richards. Description of scheme and project. Why it failed. The equipment tried out in Berkshire, where the soil is different. The equipment soon collapsed.
0:31:19 Description of the Kongwa region, the Africans. The peanuts burnt up by the sun, a huge waste. To impress visitors, ground nuts were imported from South Africa.
A farce. Clergymen ran social programs. I abandoned language teaching. We ended up reproducing the colonial cultural division of labour, equipping whites to control African labour.
0:32:34 I was visited by the C.I.D. – my mail was opened regularly and they pulverized left-wing mail. There was one law for ‘politicos’, another for racketeers [for example a senior engineer in charge of the Training School, fired for embezzlement].
0:34:00 went home, no job, no money, except what I had saved, aged 22. I still wanted to be an anthropologist, but there were no opportunities. [Whilst in Tanganyika, I had written] to the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and asked if there were any posts. [light getting poor] I had been to South Africa at the end of the time there and been to Johannesburg where I met Ruth First and, like others, fell wildly in love with her.
0:35:51 Coming back through the streets [from a Communist Party meeting]with an Indian we were jeered at by louts. C.P (Communist Party) meetings were curious. [Ruth showed me my first shanty-towns].
0:37:02 Went for an interview at the Colonial Office. Max Gluckman (M.G.) was one of the assessors. The job was to study race relations in Rhodesia. My answer untactful and I didn’t get job. But two weeks later a letter from M.G. to say that he had been appointed to Chair at Manchester and would I care to put in for Assistant Research Lectureship. I got a job on the basis of work in Africa. At week-ends I wrote on Hehe grammar. I had also done some recording on ‘wire’ recorder of music and language.
0:39:07 I went to Manchester and gave some lectures on Bantu languages. Victor Turner was there, and later R.Frankenberg, Freddie Bailey. Max said that ‘you’ve one great defect, that you were not trained at Cambridge and know no anthropology’. I had never read any Fortes, Evans-Pritchard etc. So read Fortes and being a Marxist I could not buy it. I was a primitive Marxist and economic determinist.
0:41:09 That is how I wrote my critique of Meyer, which won the Curl Prize. I don’t agree with my piece now, Meyer was an idealist, mystical.
0:42:04 Life was luxurious in those days. The ESRC was not whipping people to finish their theses, people had time to think. So in six weeks I wrote the piece and turned it into an M.A. and got the Curl Prize.
0:43:04 I met Fortes in London, he introduced the award ritual at the R.A.I. ‘I don’t agree with this, he said’. However, we agreed to differ. Afterwards most positive relations with Meyer and we never discussed the Tallensi. Applied to Cambridge, but Jack Goody got the job.
0:44:00 Stayed with Max and applied again to Rhodes-Livingstone and got the job. A Research post in the Institute. But M.I.5 stopped me getting the post. [poor colour on film]. I was doomed. 6 years in Africa, but the end of the road. The R-L subject to much political interference.
0:45:17 Max himself was under a cloud because he had introduced the inauspiciously sounding ‘Three Year Plan’. Max was never a red, but a radical liberal. Mary his wife was a member of the C.P. Much of the political orientation was Mary’s.
0:46:05 Max was a fine anti-colonial, his hour of glory was when he took on the [Kenya] governor [Sir Philip Mitchell] on the Mau Mau and defended the Mau Mau. Supreme courage. He talked on the radio about it. He was very popular on the radio [indeed a celebrity]. Anthropology was a subject on the 3rd programme. He exposed the torture in the camps. I was very actively involved in anti-colonial movements, all to my undoing. It blocked me.
0:47:48 I was told [by Max] that I had better go to Australia. Nadel had just been appointed at Canberra. Firth interviewed me and I and Ken Burridge got scholarships. On the ship, news came over the radio that Menzies was having a referendum on outlawing the communist party. Much to everyone’s surprise it was rejected [but only by 100,000 votes]. I was planning to go to the Central Highlands of New Guinea. I read all the reports etc of the [Australian equivalent of the ]Colonial Office. It was run by the strange Freddy Rose [an ex-meteorologist] Freddy went up to Groote Eylandt to get near the aborigines. It was a seaplane base from England to Sydney. Rose studied the aboriginal kinship system.
0:50:51 These were bad times. I wrote an article on this [‘What CP policy should be’ in the Communist Review, (see my contribution to the Stanley Diamond festschrift), and was invited to present my arguments at the CP National Executive!]What happened with McCarthy in the U.S. happened everywhere in the 1950’s. It was awful and we thought they were going to arrest all the Communists. I buried my C.P. literature in the garden. It was provoked by a Soviet defection.
0:52:07 The first European to New Guinea was a Russian [of Petrov, a “diplomat”]. I had taught myself Russian, while travelling into Manchester and could read Soviet anthropology. I had some connections with Soviet Anthropologists, one of them poisoned by the secret police [in Dar es Salaam]. A nice story about how one had chosen his fieldwork. I got some early Russian writings on New Guinea. And I was not jailed, though Freddy Rose was on trial at the Royal Commission on Espionage. Nothing was proved.
0:54:57 The Australian Communists were lovely people, but living underground. Later I was in trouble and I would not admit I was a communist. I do not see why I should, because of Habeas Corpus. I would defend my denial and refused to make a statement. Freddy was fired and went off to Tasmania . He ended up in East Berlin and wrote a most exhaustive study of kinship among the Groote Eylandt Aborigines. A historical landmark.
0:57:48 I bought enough food for a year and prepared for a year in the Highlands of PNG and a day before I was going went for my entry permit and was refused.
0:58:39 I thought ‘to Hell. If I’m ruined, then I’ll pull the temple down’ and I went public. All Hell broke out – the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald etc. Parliament Debates. Many attacked me. I and others had set up a student association. Ten of us. It took up my case and lined up with all other Universities. It was pretty hellish, hounded by the paparazzi. A miserable time, on the phone all the time. Sheila in a bad way with it.
Some added notes by Peter Worsley on the above (written in 2004).
Note 1: The Jesuit teachers awarded ‘red bills’, written in Latin (and headed Ad majorem Dei Gloria), for good work and behaviour, e.g. homework. They had a numerical value (e.g. 6). This was the carrot. The stick was, literally, a whalebone ferrule – you were hit on the hand, say, 6 times for offences – very painful.
In theory, you could evade the punishment by ‘cashing in’ a red bill. But in fact, there was indeterminacy – you never knew whether they’d accept it or not! This disgusted me – both the brutality, and the notion of ‘exchanging’ (cancelling) ‘sins’ by merit stored up in red bills. (I thought you should be sanctioned for bad deeds (though not via a ferrule!) and rewarded for good ones. See how this institution affected me – I’m still going on about it 70 years later!
Note 2: When I transferred schools, I was 3 years ahead in Latin and way behind in maths. This shaped my entire academic trajectory (even now). At the RC school (St. Francis Xavier’s) we were constantly made to attend ‘sodalities’ (religious society meetings at the end of the school-day (and to bring pennies for various religious causes).
Note 3: An important factor was the sectarian division on Merseyside into Roman Catholic and Protestant. People kept off the street during rival ‘processions’ – bricks might be thrown (we were told). I became Head Boy at Wallasey Grammar School in 1940/1, but, despite this eminence, as I was a Catholic, wasn’t allowed to attend morning Assembly, which had some religious content. So the Catholic and Jewish boys waited in a room off the main hall (where we did our homework and told dirty jokes – I can still remember one of them!), but were let out into the Hall to hear the end part of the Assembly which deal with (non-religious) notices – sports, etc.
Note 4: In wartime, you were not called up for about a year, but had to join the training corps (and attend training sessions). You then passed ‘Certificate A’, and Cert B. This gave you automatic entry into Officer Training. I came over from Cambridge, to join guys who were years older, married, and sometimes working class (& so unhappy in this middle-class environment).